Freedom vs Necessity in International Relations: Human-Centred Approaches to Security and Development

The last two decades have seen the remarkable rise to dominance of human-centred understandings of the world. Indeed, it is now rare to read any analysis of insecurity, conflict or development which does not discuss the need to 'empower' or 'capacity-build' local individuals or communities.

In this path-breaking book, Chandler presents a radical challenge to such approaches, arguing that the solutions to the world's problems are now not perceived to lie within external structures of economic...